Saturday, May 21, 2011

It came to my attention that the official Sony Corp. history has a full chapter devoted to the history of CCD development. The chapter mainly talks about 70s and 80s works. At productization of its first 120Kpixel CCDs in 1979 the company's accumulated investment has reached 20 billion yen.

Kazuo Iwama, Sony president in 1976-82, avidly supported the early CCD development. His tombstone has CCD chip embedded in it:

3 comments:

It is interesting to read what the Sony historian has to say, including the state circa 1973 "Except for Sony, almost all competitors vying to develop CCDs had quit."

While of course Sony did become the world's giant in CCDs, I think 1973 was a little early to pronounce the end of competitor's efforts. That seems to have happened in the late 70's early 80's, and much later for RCA and not until recently for Kodak.

Coincidentally, material from the 1973 CCD Conference, the 1974 CCD conference and 1976 CCD conference has been added to the www.imagesensors.org on-line library, courtesy of Dick Bredthauer and Albert Theuwissen. It complements the prior material from Marvin White.I believe this completes the available body of CCD conference literature prior to the 1986 IEEE Workshop on CCDs, but correct me if I missed something.

Looking at the papers from 1973 and later conference proceedings does not fit too well with the Sony history.

By the way, one of the first few papers in 1973 deals with frontside vs. backside illumination.

Albert Theuwissen informs me that I missed the 1979 CCD Conference. He will be providing pdf data that we will post in the library in the coming month or two. -EF(something wrong with the blog sign-in this morning)